


116

by justalittlehungry



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Bucky Barnes-centric, Dehumanization, Enduring love, Gore, Loss of Identity, M/M, Mental Conditioning, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:55:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25354336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justalittlehungry/pseuds/justalittlehungry
Summary: Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove:O, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark,That looks on tempests and is never shakenThe Soldier was made by scientists, and unmade by itself - themself - himself to find his way back to Steve.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Kudos: 13





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be pretty dark for a while, y'all. Much of the story deals with Bucky's loss of personal identity and dehumanization as the Winter Soldier, and the rather horrifying things that were done to him and by him during that time. Most of the violence and gore is described plainly and clinically - less torture porn, more matter-of-fact. 
> 
> But this does have a positive, happy ending - the overarching theme is about the endurance of love through all the changes and difficulties life brings, and learning how to accept those changes in yourself and your partner.

_The night before The Fall._

“Is it okay?”

“Wassat, doll?” Bucky slurred out, mostly asleep.

“That I’m different, bigger. That it’s permanent.”

“Steve. Stevie, look at me. No matter what, no matter how much you ever change, I will always love you. It’s you and me, pal, to the end of the line.”

Steve smiled shyly. “Love you too, Buck. Thanks. And sorry.”

“Don’t give me that sorry, ya dumb punk. Besides, if I had an issue, don’t you think it would have come up already?”

“Yeah, I know. I just . . . I dunno, got scared. This mission could be the big one - it could get us everything we need to stop Hydra in its tracks. The war’s ending soon, and we’ll be going home. I dunno. I guess I just thought that maybe the changes were okay here, in battle, but at home it might be different.”

The look Bucky gave Steve was a textbook-perfect example of incredulity. “You’re a fuckin idiot, Rogers.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

“Anytime, Stevie.”

***

Three days later, still reeling from the update from the radio tech that their search and retrieval had firmly yielded a KIA, Steve found a letter from a dead man in his pack. It was a poem, copied down in neat script.

_Let me not to the marriage of true minds_

_Admit impediments. Love is not love_

_Which alters when it alteration finds,_

_Or bends with the remover to remove:_

_O, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark,_

_That looks on tempests and is never shaken;_

_It is the star to every wandering bark,_

_Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken._

_Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks_

_Within his bending sickle's compass come;_

_Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,_

_But bears it out even to the edge of doom._

_If this be error and upon me proved,_

_I never writ, nor no man ever loved._

_Love you forever and always, Stevie._

_-B_

Steve sat down and cried.

Two days later, a plane fell into the ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poem is Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 because Bucky is a sappy nerd like that
> 
> Also, y'all please let me know if you see any mistakes in the writing - my computer is on its last leg so I'm mostly writing this on my iPad, so iOS keeps "correcting" me in very stupid ways. I did tweak the end of the prologue to fit with the timeline I was able to find - apparently Bucky falls on 1 Feb 1945, and the Valkyrie crashes 5 Feb 1945


	2. The Death of Bucky Barnes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: semi-graphic descriptions of blood, gore, vomiting, and some mild body horror in the first part of the chapter (the immediate aftermath of Bucky's fall)
> 
> From this point on, the story is written in present-tense, as experienced by Bucky
> 
> Dialogue in italics are being spoken in another language (in this chapter's case, Russian); plain text in italics is internal thoughts

Pain. Everything is pain, and fire, and ice. His eyes blearily blink open, and then shut again after making it halfway. More pain. Another blink, and he notices the blood. It's quite a bit of blood, he thinks, staining the snow a sickening red. He absently notes the blood is concentrated on his left side, by his arm. No. Wait. That is . . . not an arm. Where his arm used to be is a shredded, disgusting mass of muscle and bone and sinew. That bit there might be a scrap of elbow. He tries to move it, see if it's elbow.

Oh God. Pain flares white-hot through the possibly-dislocated, possibly-destroyed shoulder and down into all the raw exposed nerves of the not-an-arm. The slight drag he manages with the shrug is enough to catch a frayed bit of muscle against a rock in the snow, and a sizable chunk of flesh tears away from his body. Bucky arches into the pain, vomits violently in the snow, and passes out again.

Too soon, he comes back to. Each blink brings more awareness, and the shock of pain fading as though the pain had transferred to nausea and he’d sicked all that pain up. Clarity of thought starts to return. That’s . . . not right. He was . . . he’d fallen. From the train. A long fall, a precarious fall. He vaguely remembers trying to grab onto a ledge or maybe it was a tree, trying to stop his fall. That'd explain the arm. But . . . how is he alive? He should have died on impact. He should be completely broken into pieces, his ribs should be shattered into a million pieces, his heart and lungs perforated. His spine should be cracked in half or fourths or tenths, his skull a puzzle of little fragments no longer holding the soup of his brain. How is he - mostly - whole and undamaged?

Even if the fall didn’t break his body, he should still not be alive. The pain and blood loss from the sudden, traumatic partial amputation of his arm should have sent him into shock, or the cold into hypothermia. But he doesn’t feel numb, his heart is neither racing nor sluggish, his breathing is fairly steady and calm. The pain is still there, horrendous, screeching pain, but he can now ignore it. Beyond that he feels . . . almost fine. How?

How could be ignored for now. He needs to get help, get back to Allied Command, get back to Steve. God, Steve. The memory of Steve’s face as he fell seems imprinted on his mind. He needs to tell Steve he’s okay. He can picture Steve clearly, imagines how panicked and worried and - God, Steve probably blames himself for this. That damn fool is probably going out of his mind, thinking it's his fault Bucky fell. He probably can't even imagine how glad Bucky is that it's him here suffering and not Steve.

He hears shouting then, and his breath catches - who would be out here? As the voices come closer, he recognizes the language. Russian, thank God. Why the fuck are the Soviets all the way out here? Who the fuck cares, they can get him to a radio and a radio means talking to Steve.

“I am an American soldier,” he tells them. “Help me, please, I need to get in contact with my unit.”

The leader of the small group nods at him, and barks at the others to help carry him back to their base. The movements remind him violently of the pain where his arm was, and the constancy has him soon drifting back out of consciousness.

When he comes to, he is in a small encampment bustling with Soviet soldiers. His shoulder is wrapped, neatly, with a squat cylinder of upper arm bandaged below it and tied fast to his torso. He doesn’t try to shrug this time. Bucky assumes they relocated his shoulder amputated the rest of the not-arm and is immensely grateful he wasn’t awake when they removed the scraps of flesh. His dog tags are prominently displayed on his chest - he wonders if they had to give him blood, or if they just needed to ID him. A man is sitting next to him, and gives him a strange, almost cruel smile as he wakes.

“Do you know who you are, soldier?” The man asks in English.

“Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038." The familiar words fall out of his mouth automatically, as easy as breathing. "Please, I need to contact my unit, let them know I’m alive.” The man’s odd, twisted smile grew.

“Of course, Sergeant Barnes. They will be glad to hear you are alive - they have put out a search and retrieval for you. I will need to borrow your information to relay to them, let them know it is really you.” The man reaches forward and, before Bucky can make any protest, plucks his tags off of him. He turns to one of the soldiers walking by and commands him in Russian, “ _Radio the Americans. Tell them we found their missing sergeant dead_. _Not enough left of the body for retrieval, we are sending his identification tags to them.”_ Bucky’s tags are dropped in the soldier’s hands and he watches his chances of a rescue fall with them.

What the fuck? Who the fuck are these people? Why are the Soviets betraying them? Fear and panic and nausea start to rise in his gorge. 

_“No, please, no, I’m alive, I have to get back to them, please, I have to talk to Steve! You’re our allies, please, you have to let me go!”_ Bucky starts begging, babbling back in Russian, panic setting in. The commander’s cruel grin sharpens as he realizes Bucky understood the orders.

“ _I’m sorry, soldier, but they are no longer your concern. You belong to us now. And you will be our indestructible weapon.”_


	3. How the Soldier Was Born

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: 
> 
> Torture, dehumanization, loss of personal identity, non-consensual drug use

HYDRA. Always fucking HYDRA. Somehow they’d gotten their hooks into the Soviets - or at least these Soviets - and they’d found him first when the search and retrieval went out. Of all the fucking rotten luck, he had to get captured _again_ by goddamned fucking HYDRA, and this time they’re convinced that Zola’s goddamn experiments on him worked and he’s pumped full of whatever goddamn thing made Stevie into the behemoth he is today. Goddamn it. 

He hasn’t decided if they’re full of shit or not. By now his body is largely healed from the fall - though they had to do another surgery on his arm. The shoulder must have been completely destroyed, because they went in and dug the entire ball joint out and had chipped away at his scapula until the socket was less socket and more gaping maw. So he's alive and more-or-less well, there’s that rather improbable fact, but he’s not convinced that whatever Zola did to him was as impressive as turning 90lb, asthmatic, color-blind and half-deaf Steve Rogers into the massive hunk of muscle and good health and physical perfection that is Captain America. It just doesn’t seem so likely in comparison.

“ _Good morning, soldier. Are you ready to comply?”_ This dick. Bucky hasn’t picked up on a name for him yet, so he just thinks of him as Dr. Asshole, but this guy was certain that he was going to make Bucky turn traitor and start working for HYDRA. As though there was anything that would make him turn against the Allies, turn against _Steve._ Not likely. Not as long as he’s in charge of his own brain, that’s never happening. He’s been tortured before, he’ll withstand it again. Fucking HYDRA pricks clearly don't understand how torture works, but he has enough first-hand experience to know what's going to happen. Eventually he’ll die, or they’ll give up and kill him, or he’ll be rescued.

The torture isn't even that impressive. Sure, he's strapped down to some creepy as fuck chair, and Asshole clearly has a hard-on for pumping him full of electricity at the drop of a hat. But beyond that and the annoying, constant repetition of asking him if he's ready to "comply" - whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean - they're not actually doing much of anything. Bucky thinks that maybe they're waiting for something. Maybe HYDRA has some extra trick up its sleeve and is just waiting to spring it on him. Or maybe they're just waiting for him to go insane. 

Bucky doesn’t look at Asshole, ignores his questions. “Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038.” Name, rank, serial number; repeat. 

***

It only takes a couple of weeks for Bucky to break his rote recitation. 

He can hear Asshole and Shit-for-brains talking quietly in the hall outside his room. He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be able to hear them, but nonetheless it comes through.

_“Why is it not responding to the treatment? We can’t go further without risking the body.”_ Ugh, Bucky hates how they refer to him as ‘it’, like he’s not a person. It scares him to know what their endgame is, that they want to kill him but keep his body alive, a thing instead of a human.

_“I think it’s the mind, commander. A strong enough will can keep it going up to death. But I believe I have a solution. I think a two-pronged approach could work: we reintroduce more of the serum, and at the same time break its spirit. The trauma should allow the treatment to get a foothold, and the serum will keep the break in place. Once the mind is prepped, I believe the treatments will be able to progress.”_

_“We are trusting you with this, doctor, but do not forget that it is the only one to survive the initial serum. Any damage that occurs will be noted. Do not harm the weapon.”_

Asshole’s assent is quiet, high-pitched, keening - Bucky can tell he’s afraid of what will happen if they accidentally kill him. Good. Fucker should be afraid, because when he gets out he’ll hunt them down and he’s not going to stop until HYDRA’s burnt to the ground, every head cut bloodily off and the body razed. The viciousness of the thought grounds him as they walk in.

“ _Good morning, soldier. Today, I thought I would update you on the glorious battles HYDRA is facing. Sadly, our primary weapon stock has been lost to us."_

Bucky can't help but smirk a little at that. "Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038."

_“However, I bring you good tidings for HYDRA as well. You will be pleased to know your former captain is dead, soldier."_

The shock, the impossibility of that is enough to make a crack in Bucky's nonchalant facade. He stops halfway through his name.

_"Our weapons may be gone, but all is not lost. We will simple create new weapons, better weapons. Weapons that can think enough to fire themselves. And I believe you are the perfect opportunity for us to try this. You will be our prototype, I think. Perhaps one day if you are good enough you can be a weapon yourself. You should be proud, soldier; you will help us create our new world.”_

“Never. I would never do that.” Bucky is scared they’re telling the truth, that Stevie really is gone. But this is HYDRA, and they’re a bunch of fucking pricks and liars and evil scum. There’s no way, right? It’s Steve, that dumb punk was practically invincible even when he weighed nothing and his lungs constantly threatened to give out. He can’t be dead. And Bucky realizes - he’s _pissed_ , these dickheads should just give up already. He sees Dr. Asshole smile at Commander Shit-for-brains and realizes that he’s responded, given them exactly what they want - a reaction. Fuck. “Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038.”

Shit-for-brains nods at Asshole, who begins to attach all sorts of extra wires and straps and monitors to Bucky.

“ _Pretty little soldier. You think that now, but you don’t understand, do you?”_

Asshole is prodding at his remaining arm, then stabs in a needle. Bucky sees him hook it up to an IV bag of some gross, greenish liquid. Oh God. Fear starts to creep in a bit as he remembers the mindlessness and enduring pain and strange ecstasy he felt at Azzano when Zola injected him with his mystery drugs. Shit-for-brains strokes Bucky’s cheek once with the back of his hand, which is rather freaky and gross of him. Bucky struggles to hide a shudder of revulsion as his fear continues to escalate. “ _You still think we have a reason to let you keep using that pretty head for yourself. You don’t know all the things we can do to take all that stubborn self-thought away. We do not want or need you for your brains, soldier. You are not a person anymore. You will not have a brain. You are a vessel for our glorious purpose. You are the fist of our organization. You are a weapon, nothing more, and when we are done with you, there will not be enough free thought in that head of yours to have a name, much less such distasteful convictions.”_ He looks up at Asshole. “ _Are you ready to begin the asset’s treatment?”_

Asshole nods. “Yes, commander. Treatment ready on your mark.”

Bucky shakes, quivers really, as the fear continues to ratchet higher. Still, he continues his mantra - “Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038. Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038. Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038.” _This is who I am. I am James Buchanan Barnes. Born in Brooklyn, New York. My mother’s name is Winifred. My sister’s name is Rebecca. My name is Bucky. My best friend is Steve Rogers. I love him. He loves me. I will not forget who I am._ “Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038. Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038.” He keeps the repeat, trying to drown out his fear, and completely misses when the commander signals the doctor to begin.

And then there’s pain, white hot and freezing cold and blistering electricity and a new, overwhelming euphoria and -

Nothing.

When he comes to, it takes nearly five minutes of staring at a blank wall to remember where he is, that he’s being held captive. 

“ _Good morning, soldier. Are you ready to comply?_ ” Fuck you, Shit-for-brains, you can shove your compliance up your ass. The anger is there, but in the lingering haze it seems thready. He musters up his control, tries to push aside the fear. _Steve's okay. He has to be okay._

“Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038.”

Shit-for-brains sighs. _“Doctor, again.”_

More pain, more fear, but in between his screams: “Barnes, James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038!”

***

Barnes, James Buchanan - Bucky - has lost count of how many “treatments” he’s received. Every time, Shit-for-brains tells him good morning, but Bucky - Sergeant; 32557038 - is pretty sure that he’s lying about both the good and the morning parts of the statement. Barnes - Bucky - thinks it’s been at least ten treatments, but Sergeant - Bucky - could be wrong. It’s getting harder to hold onto some of the ties to Bucky’s - 32557038 - memory and self-identity, but he’s managed to keep a tenacious grip on the most of the important bits. _My name is Bucky. Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant. 32557038. My birthday is . . . I am in love with my best friend. My mother’s name is . . . My sister’s name is Rebecca. I am a member of the United States . . . Army? I was born in . . . My best friend is Steve Rogers. My name is Bucky Barnes. Steve loves me. Steve might be dead? I am a prisoner of war. I am being held captive by . . . I am a person. My name is James Buchanan Barnes. I am me. I will not forget who I am._

***

32557038 is losing themself. They aren’t sure of how many times the doctor and the commander had treated them. They aren’t sure who the doctor was, or who the commander was, or what they were being treated for. They’re pretty sure they’re a person, but the details beyond that are fuzzy. 32557038 thinks maybe they were being punished, but they aren’t sure why; or maybe this is medicine? Maybe they are sick and the drugs and electricity and constant cresting torrents of pain are to heal an injury. 32557038 blearily looks around. They notice that they only have one arm - is this the injury they are being treated for? It must be. They wonder how the arm was lost and -

_suddenly he’s falling, falling, and he’s a he, not a unknown entity, not just a thought but a person, and he doesn’t know who the person is but he is a person, and as he falls there’s a man reaching for him, screaming for him, and he wants nothing more than to stay with the man, the beautiful, golden man who looks so sad, he knows him, better than he knows himself, he knows . . . Steve, that’s the man’s name, Steve, growing farther and farther away, but why, he’s not supposed to be going away from Steve, it should always be him with Steve, but Steve is . . . gone, Steve is dead, but Steve is still his, always his, his friend, his favorite person, the one he loves, always, he promised Steve, to the end of the line, end of the line, end of the -_

the doctor walks in. The tremulous tendrils of thought start to fray and break, and _no,_ they -he - will not let that happen, can’t let that happen, and even as he - they - start to lose and forget again, they bury that last little golden thought, of Steve and the end of the line and forever. 32557038 hides it deep, deep down where they can’t even touch it, can’t even see it, and if they don’t see it, maybe the doctor and the commander won’t either, and it’ll be safe.

They’ve lost everything else, but they can try to protect this, even if it means they can’t look at it and feel its beauty and hope and promise. They made a promise, and as the doctor starts to prep them for their treatment, they can’t quite recall what the promise was or who it was for, but they promised it nonetheless and -

The pain washes in, and the euphoric shock of drugs, and the hot and cold and electric, and as those rinse over them, the idea of the promise and the man and forever drifts away down, down, down.

They scream, and the numbers that they scream become jumbled and loose as the treatment continues until it’s not quite sure why it is screaming numbers, what the numbers mean. It realizes that the energy and effort of forming the numbers is only adding to its pain, and it doesn’t understand why it would do that. It is suboptimal to add to its pain. It lets go of the numbers, lets the scream become an amorphous wail, and it sees the man in the coat - its doctor - smile in satisfaction. 


End file.
